A U.S. District Court judge ordered Isohunt owner, Gary Fung, a 27-year-old Canadian, to remove all infringing content from his site. The ruling comes after a lawsuit launched against the Canadian Website several years ago by the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents all the major Hollywood studios. This is not the first time we have seen such a ruling against a major bittorrent site. Last year the site Mininova suffered a similar ruling, and since then has complied with it. They have lost a serious amount of traffic due to the ruling. A Swedish court also issued a similar ruling against The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest bittorrent tracker and one of the most popular sites on the internet.
Isohunt is a huge torrent index site, with over 1.7 million torrents in its database and 20 million peers from those indexed torrents. They also get about with about 30 million monthly visitors. That makes them the 3rd largest torrent site on the web. The ruling orders Mr. Fung to remove all copyrighted and infringing links and categories from the site. For those of you that don’t know what Isohunt is, it’s basically a search engine that indexes millions of torrents. None of the content is hosted on the site, all they do is point the user in the right direction. Gary Fung claims that if they have to fully comply with court order, it could mean the end of Isohunt. “Filtering against keywords. It amounts to nothing less than taking down our search engine,” he said.(via Wired)
